The Oscars of tech

📰 Artifact, the news-sharing platform founded by an Instagram co-founder, is shutting down.

🧵 Threads will allow you to follow Mastodon users on its platform by year-end.

🍎 Apple has made a big change to its app store guidelines. 

🤖 A robot has learned how to cook, clean, and do your laundry. 

📱 Samsung announced a new range of smartphones with AI built in.

Voting has officially wrapped up for the 2023 Golden Kitty Awards! You and many others cast your votes for your favorite products across 18 different categories. 

The winners will be announced tomorrow, January 23. In the meantime, let’s take a sneak peek behind the scenes. 

Every year, we have some new and some old categories depending on what’s hot in the tech world at the time, and it’s always interesting to see how you, the community, responded. 

Here’s how the votes were spread out across some of the top categories: 

In third place, we have Mobile Apps, a category that has become synonymous with the Golden Kitty Awards over the years. A whopping 6,940 votes were cast for 12 different apps, including apps like Bear 2, Character AI, and clearspace. 

Coming in at second place is No Code. This category is all about the products that help anyone be a maker, regardless of coding ability. The community cast 8,305 votes across a range of products like Bento, Tally 2.0, and SlashPage. 

Finally, in first place is 🥁…. Product of the Year. The category of categories. 9,660 votes were cast to decide which product walks away with the coveted Product of the Year title and all the bragging rights that go with it. Votes were cast across products like Notion AI, Threads, and GPT-4.

Overall, there were a staggering 93,000+ votes cast across the whole 18 categories. Make sure to check back tomorrow when we announce the winners. In the meantime, if you want a refresher on previous years, check out the Hall of Fame. 

📅 NEW from Notion: Remember the Golden Kitty Award Winner for Best Productivity App in the 2021 awards? It was Cron. The calendar app went on to be acquired by Notion. Now, Notion has launched Notion Calendar, a standalone calendar that replaces Cron. But keeps many of the same features. 

🗳️ AI elections: 2024 is a big year for politics. Almost half the world will go to the polls to elect their respective leaders. The big one on people’s minds is the US election, and OpenAI is getting ahead of it by announcing the company’s plans to add election guardrails to ChatGPT.

PRODUCTIVITY 

• HabitStreak helps you build habits, track your progress, and hit goals.

• Squad is a group accountability platform for tracking habits and hitting goals. 

DEV TOOLS 

• RepoCloud is a 1-click deploy solution for 200+ SaaS platforms.

• This tool converts images to React-based particle displays. 

DESIGN

• Koosh uses AI to turn static sites into engaging experiences. 

• iFoto uses AI to generate high-converting e-commerce images. 

FUN

• Commit Art turns your Git commits into a work of art.

• AI Picasso turns still images into animated, dancing videos.